Ki Teitzei
Deuteronomy 21:10 – 25:19
Each year, when I meet Ki Teitzei I realize again why so many people are moved to abandon any kind of religious pursuit. Though we find many uplifting verses about ethical living in society 2,500 years ago, some of what we read in this portion goes squarely against our most basic sensitivities in the modern age. Laws about rape are among the most disturbing to us, for they negate the fundamental rights of women and, furthermore, often compound the woman’s suffering because the sentencing punishes both the perpetrator and the victim.
What do we, citizens of the 21st Century, do with such a Torah portion? Some would like to delete the outdated passages and keep only the ones that align with our current worldview. Yet had our forebears edited out distasteful passages in every generation, there wouldn’t be much left of the text after 2,500 years. Torah would be so diminished that it would be unrecognizable, and we would lose our rootedness in a shared spiritual document. And our roots would disappear altogether if, as some have suggested, we simply discarded the Torah as an obsolete, anachronistic relic.
The problem with these responses stems from their premise. They both assume that religion or spirituality should be exclusively about “the good stuff”: love, compassion, and kindness. Our reaction to a Torah portion like this is a reflection of such a worldview. We start with the expectation that our lives and our world ought to be good, loving, and nice. We become resentful when our reality doesn’t meet these impossible expectations. So, we surmise, if we can’t find that in the “real world,” then at least spirituality must be able to provide this elusive goodness and yearned-for love. We find ourselves attracted to spiritual teachers and gurus who preach messages of love and light and become addicted to simplistic platitudes. But as they continue to sell us on what our ego wants to hear, we allow ourselves to be lulled into an ever-deeper slumber. And that is not true spirituality.
True spirituality is like Torah when Torah reflects back to us the unsavory parts of the universal ego as well as “the good stuff.” Torah, as it is, is an expression of our human condition in all its verses, and our discomfort with it speaks to our own biases. Our engaging with Torah shouldn’t be solely about uncovering the good and the light; it should also be about wrestling with the shadow and the darkness—in ourselves as well as in our sacred texts. To engage only with the light is unbalanced and dangerous. We can’t just ignore the darkness. We need to confront it—with light! Loving when the world is hateful, having compassion when society is telling us to be narcissistic, expressing kindness when all around us is callousness and carelessness, and knowing that we too harbor both sides of each divide: that’s true spirituality.
In our necessarily tumultuous relationship with Torah we learn to be with what is, as it presents itself to us. We learn to choose it all, welcome it all; to reject nothing, cut out nothing. Most importantly we learn to wrestle with what makes us uncomfortable, to know ourselves in all our light and our darkness in order that we might ultimately transcend our self. Such is the journey, and such is the path of Torah.